God loves...me!

Over the past week, I have been gripped by a certain line from one of my favorite hymns.

"Why was I made to hear Thy voice, and enter while there's room, when thousands make a wretched choice and rather starve than come?"

In the goodness and providence of God, we sang this hymn ("How Sweet and Awful is the Place") in our corporate worship today.

The answer to this question is not found in myself. It was not because I was smarter, wiser, bolder, more righteous, less stubborn, or more stubborn than my unsaved family, friends, and acquaintances.

Moses explained to God's covenant people of old in Deuteronomy 7:

6 "For you are a holy people to the LORD your God; the LORD your God has chosen you to be a people for His own possession out of all the peoples who are on the face of the earth.
7 The LORD did not set His love on you nor choose you because you were more in number than any of the peoples, for you were the fewest of all peoples,
8 but because the LORD loved you and kept the oath which He swore to your forefathers, the LORD brought you out by a mighty hand and redeemed you from the house of slavery, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt.

And it is no different for the New Covenant believer!

Ephesians 1
3 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ,
4 just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we would be holy and blameless before Him. In love
5 He predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the kind intention of His will,
6 to the praise of the glory of His grace, which He freely bestowed on us in the Beloved.

Ephesians 2
3 Among them we too all formerly lived in the lusts of our flesh, indulging the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest.
4 But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us,
5 even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved),
6 and raised us up with Him, and seated us with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus

It was because God chose to love me. Not that I loved God, but that He loved me. May I never get over the wonder of that. May no Christian ever get over the wonder of that! And may God root out the pride in our hearts that causes us to think of ourselves more highly than we ought! It truly is not about us but is all about God and His love and His Son and His glory!